^ KEI^LY 



TO A RESOLlITiDN OK THE 




1 



READ ItEKORE THE SOCIETY 



AT ITS ANNIYEESARY MEETING, 



February 12th, 1866, 



Rt. Rev. STEPHEN EELIOTT, 



PRESIDENT OF THK SOCIETY 



PrBLlSlIED AT THE REQIEST OF THE SOCIETV 




PURSE AND SON, PRINTERS. 

1866. 



A^ REI^LY 



TO A RKSOLUTION OF TllK 




KEAD 15EF0RE THK SOCIETY' 



AT ITS ANNIVERSAM MEETING, 



February 12th, 1866 



^: 



Rt. Rev. STEPHEN EELIOTT, 



PRESIDENT OF. THE SOCIETY. 



PUBLISHED AT THE REQl'EST OF THE SOCIETY. 




PURSE AND SON. PRINTERS. 

18GG. 



Gr37 



WWSltM© 



Savannah, Jan. Otli, 18CG. 
Bishop Elliott : — Dear Sir. 

At a meeting of the Georgia Historical Society held last evening, 
the following resolution was unanimously adopted, and the under- 
signed was instructed to present you a copy. 

Resolved, ''That the Society respectfully ask the President to 
present, as early as convenient, his views on the prospects of the 
Society and the best method of increasing and extending its useful- 
ness." 

It waa also suggested that the anniversary meeting would be a 
suitable occasion, if it would be convenient for you. 

I am very respectfully, 

EASTON YONGE, 
Recording Secretary. 



A.DDIIESS. 



Gentlemen of the Georgia Historical Society : 

In reply to a resolution of your honorable body, 
conveyed to me through your Secretary, inviting me 
to offer you, at this our anniversary meeting, my views 
upon the feasibility of rendering our society more use- 
ful to tlie community, of which it is the sole literary cor- 
poration, I offer you the following remarks. 

It is very painful to admit it, but it is nevertheless the 
truth, that the literary spirit, which once animated 
Savani.iali, luis almost entirely died out from lack 
of cultivation. Although I have lived in Savan- 
nah only twenty-five years, I remember its society for 
full forty years, having visited it very frequently dur- 
ing ray boyhood and early manhood. Upon these visits, 
I was brought into contact with its cleverest men and I 
found among them a very high standard of literary ex- 
cellence and of classical attainment. And while my 
own recollection does not include the whole period, of 
the palmiest days of that cultivated and refined society, 
I lived among those, who had been the compeers and 
friends of such as had passed away. When I first re- 
member Savannah it was illustrated by the culture of 
such' men as Richard Henry Wilde, Anthony Barclay, 
Charles Harris, Richard W. Habersham, Judge Berrien, 
Alfred Cuthbcrt, Dr. Lemuel Kollock, Dr. Waring, Dr. 
Marshall, Wm. B. Bulloch, and a host of younger men 



6 



just rising into notice, and by the social influence of 
William Gaston, of Thomas Young, of Petit De Vilers 
and as he -was universally called, of Jack Henry, who 
gathered around their hospitable boards all that was 
clever and refined, not only of her own citizens', but of 
strangers from every quarter. And these men could go 
back to earlier scholars, who had died out, to Cranstoun, 
the accomplished rector of Christ Church, to Dr. Henry 
Kollock, the eloquent minister of the Independent 
Church, who has left upon this communitv as deep an 
impress as any man of his time, to Noel and Woodruff 
who led the bar, and to Grimes, whose medical reputa- 
tion was of the highest mark. With these freely inter- 
mingled such visitors as Spalding, the most widely read 
man of his day. Win. Cumming whose conversational 
powers were of the most uncommon character, John 
Forsyth, Governor Troup and Wm. H. Crawford, whose 
reputations afterwards became national. And when 
you recall these men (some of whom you have known 
individually in their later days, and one or two of whom 
yet survive to teach us what the rest were) and" group 
them, you will at once acknowledge, without underat- 
ing the present times, that they were very superior to 
any circle that we could collect to day. And when I 
say this, I would cast no especial shame upon Savannah. 
The same deterioration has occurred every where. There 
could not be collected to-day in Richmond any such so- 
ciety as distinguished her sixty years ago, when Madi- 
son and Geo. Mason and Pendleton and Wickham and 
Randolph and Tazewell might have been found at one ta- 
ble. You could not assemble in Charleston now such men 
as came together even in mj early days, let alone those 
who preceded them, when John Rutlcdge and the two 
Pinckneys and Cheves and Julius Pringlc and Wm. 
Lowndes and Bond Ion, and men of that stamp, who had 



been horsed at Westminster and had read law in the tem- 
ple, made every dinner-table a scene of rich intellectual 
enjoyment. As late as forty-five or six years ago, when I 
first remember Charleston distinctly, the whole commmu- 
nity was daily aglow with the wit of the yonngmen about 
town, who threw off their fancies through the newspapers 
and fly sheets, sure of finding an appreciative audience, 
of such men as William Crafts, whose fugitive pieces are 
among the purest gems of Southern literature, as 
Ilenry Harby whose cleverness promised a higher posi- 
tion than he ever assumed, as Holland, whose wit found 
an early grave, as Tom Bee with the heavy university 
scholarship of his Omnium gatherum, and the young 
bloods with their Omnium botherum got up to make fun 
of the old scholar, as a hundred others who made up 
the literary coteries of the times. Alas no! it is not 
Savannah alone ; it is the whole country, Boston 
perhaps excepted, which has lost literary tone and 
taste. Democratic institutions and levelling principles 
have done their work, and save where some great liter- 
ary institution, with proper endowments to make it in- 
dependent of popular favor, has stayed the flood, every- 
thing, which deserves the name of literature, has been 
swept away before the all absorbing interest of politics 
of business and of practical life. Science has flourished and 
advanced, because science is necessary to commerce, to 
navigation and to the production of wealth, but literature, 
which is only elegant and refining, has retired into pri- 
vate life, content to adorn the circles of home, but too 
sensitive to brave the contemptuous and sneering spirit 
of utilitarianism. 

Can the old literary spirit be revived ? I fear not 
to the extent to which it once existed or in which it 
continues to exist in our Fatherland. Literature must 
have a fitting audience to make it flourish and that an- 



dience will regulate its tone. We shall have in the 
United States an immense reading public; we have it 
ah'cady. But wliat is the literature in whfcli it 
delights? Sensation novels, pictorial newspapers, 
political sheets growing every day more vulgar 
and abusive, jest books like the travels of Ar- 
temns Ward or Phenixiana or Simon Suggs, and 
Magazines fall of false grammar, false taste and false- 
hood. This is the pabulum on which this great nation 
daily feeds, now when its joints and sinews are knitting 
together, when its habits of thought and feeling are be- 
ing formed, when its tone, which at last makes the true 
greatness of a nation, is assuming shape and character. 
Any heavier food than this turns its weak stomach. 
Boston lying under the shadow of a great university is 
really the only point which is producing any thing in 
true literature and that is so impregnated with fanati- 
cism and rationalism, that it is not pleasant for us nor 
safe for anybody to indulge much in it. New York is a 
great book mart, a great publishing centre, but she pro- 
duces now-a-da^'s no such writers as Washington Irving, 
Paulding, Yerplauck, Cooper or Bryant, all whose ra- 
ciest and most genuine writings are of the past. Phil- 
adelphia is a centre of science, but she has no literature 
other own, no art such as she once could boast of. Her 
artists and her novelists, AVest, Sully, Stuart, Brockden, 
Brown, have died out and left no successors. Every 
literary review of a high order, which lias been estab- 
lished in the United States, has expired after a very 
brief existence. The North American Review, if it ex- 
ists at all, is languishing and has no influence upon the 
country. Tiie American Quarterly, after a few years 
of most unutterable dulness, went out for want of 
brains. The Nsw York Eeview, of a much higher or- 
der of writing, could not withstand the inevitable law of 



9 



failure. The original Southern Keview, whose articles 
were, many of them, equal to the very best writ ing of the 
Edinburf^h, not excepting even Macaulay's, succumbed, 
from lack of patronage, at the end of its fourth year. 
Harper alone survives, because it is furnished with nu- 
merous engravings, and stoties by foreign writers and has 
a monthly drawer of poor jokes, newer perhaps, but not as 
good as Joe Miller. The fact is patent and cannot be de- 
nied. With the exception of a few historical works pro- 
duced in Boston and now and then a philological work by 
such a true scholar as Marsh, all our literature comis 
from abroad. Even our school books are plagiarized 
wholesale from Germany, England and Scotland. The 
taste of the nation is shockinnly low and must be grati- 
fied, and this decline in taste has been coincident with 
the passing away of tlie old English education, until 
now it is satisfied only with frivolity or what is worse, 
vulgarity and obscenity. The caricature which appear- 
ed lately in one of our satirical papers is only too true. 
Two young women are represented as applying at a cir- 
culating library for books, and the answer which they 
receive from the shopman is "I regret very much, ladies, 
that I have to-day no murder nor any adultery, but I am 
expecting at the end of the week two bigamies." 

It is possible however that a literary spirit may be 
in a measure revived and that sometliing may be done 
even in the midst of the confusion which sur- 
rounds us, by means of the institution of which we are 
the present administrators. The history of Geori/ia is 
very limited, because of the late period at which s!ie 
was settled, and is not sufficient to occupy the whole at- 
tention of a s< 'ciety like this. Its topics of interest have 
been already very much exhausted or are beyond our 
reach, and for these reasons it is that so little interest 
has, of late, been taken in our meetings. It is very 



10 



pleasant to come togetlior once a month and talk over 
such things as amuse us or interest us, but even then our 
time is very raucli taken up with the mere routine of 
society business or with the current news of the day, 
there being very little else upon our table to engage 
our attention. We need something more than this. We 
need a resort whicii shall be open to our members every 
day and all day; where they shall find the best literature 
of tb.e current time always at their command, and men and 
women of culture to talk with about it. We have a 
right to ask from a society like this, combining within 
itself the best citizens of the ])lace, that it shall furnish 
a plan, by which mind may be brought into contact 
with mind and the tone of conversation be raised above 
politics or business or gossip. We may go on as we are 
going now for a century and no young mind will be 
fired to efibrt or excited to a higher life by our proceed- 
ings. We may meet month after month and do as we 
are doing now and none of us will gain any thing from 
our meetings of eitlier knowledge or impulse. No new 
topics are introduced ; no new books lie upon our table; 
nothing comes before us which connects us with the 
world across the water, that great centre of all that is 
beautiful in art, or grand in science, or rich in literature. 
We are in a condition of isolation and stagnation, and 
the waters must be stirred. We may not be able by 
our efl:brts to do all we might desire, but we can do 
something. We may not create a literiiture, but we 
may at least place what literature there is within the 
reach of tho"se around us. We can say to our young 
men "we ofter you the richest treasures of the old world 
and of the nevr, and if you do not choose to elevate 
yourselves, the fault will be at y^nr own doors.'' We 
can say to our young women "liere are art and literature 
and elegance and refinement spread out for your enter- 



11 



tainment, but if you prefer Wilkie Collins j Miss Brad- 
den and Mrs. AYood, you will have nobody to blame 
but yourselves, when the time of responsibility comes 
and children are lookin;,^ up to you for instruction and 
guidance." We can say to our wdiole city, old and 
young, "we desire you to rise once again to the level of 
3^our ancestors, and we now prepare for you the means 
which liave been for a long time out of your reach, un- 
less provided at your own expense, and at an unattainable 
cost." When we shall have done this, we shall have 
done our duty, and may tlien, if success is denied us, 
feel no remorse, that we have left without any effort on 
our part, our young people to the wretched influences 
which are gathering around them. The mind must be 
fed ; it craves nourishment and excitement as much as 
the body, and if good food is not furnished it, it will 
prey upon garbage. 

In order to do our duty iu this matter, we should, I 
think, commence at once the accumulation of a librar}^ 
which shall be worthy of such a city as Savannah. She 
stands almost alone among cities of her population in 
being without a public library. And what is w^orse, 
having had one, she has permitted it to decay until the 
few broken sets of books which encumber our shelves 
are all that is left of it. How difleront it is with our 
neighboring city of Charleston. Her city library, only one 
out of several, consists of nearly twenty thousand vol- 
umes of well chosen books, and there was scarcely a 
topic, not strictly technical, wiiicli could not, when I 
remember it, have been thoroughly examined within its 
walls. To that library I owed as a boy, and still owe 
as a man, unutterable gratitude. It seduced mc from 
play and from idleness, and most of my spare time was 
spent curled up in its deep old window seats, among 
books and living men from whom I derived invaluable 



12 



stimulus. The remembrance of this makes me desire 
that such a lesort should be furnished to our boys and 
young men. Mintiling; with books in childhood makes 
us love them ; tin y become our friends for life; we 
associate with them our young existence of joy and in- 
noce:".ce, and we turn to them, in manhood and old age, 
in sickness and in sorrow, as to something which shall 
give us comfort and solace. A man loses much who 
i.oes not love books, for they are the only companions 
we can always have with us, the only friends who will 
certainly not leave us, when fortune frowns upon us or 
the days of darkness come. Let us endeavor to furnish 
these companions and friends for our children; com- 
panions and friends, which if! well chosen, will never cor- 
rupt nor degrade them. And it is quite within our reach. 
It is amazing how a library grows. A thoufiand or fif-. 
teen hundred dollars a year v/ell spent (and 1 see no 
reason why we should not have double tlie amount at 
our disposal) would very soon accumulate for us a very 
respectable library, especially as we should not begin 
with empty shelves. And the existence of such a li- 
brary would very soon become a matter of i)ride to the 
citizens of Savannah, and donations and legacies would 
flow in, which would give it a wider scope and n greater 
comprehensiveness. For such a library should not be 
confined merely to books, but its managers should aim 
to procure for it works of art, statues and busts and 
paintings and prints to educate the eye as well as the 
mind. Elegance should pervade it and make it attrac- 
tive. Woman should be enticed there to lend the charm 
of her society to its graver topics. Materials and pri- 
vacy should be furnished severer students, so that they 
might use to advantage such books as should never be 
permitted to leave the walls of a library. To attain 
this ideal, a beginning must be made and I know no 



13 



better time than this. We are entering upon a new era in 
the history of our State, and let us do all in our power to 
inaugurate it with refinement and culture, even though 
it should prove to be a halo hovering around decay and 
ruins. 

There is one thing moreover which seems to be essen- 
tial to our success in this plan, and that is a removal 
from our present narrow quarters and a placing of our- 
selves in some more central position. The property 
which we own, if properly handled, should procure for 
us such a site and such a building as M^e need. The ac- 
cessibility of a library is one of its chief attractions. 
It ouirht to stand in the centre of the gi-eat fashionable 
thoroughfare of the city, where men returning from 
their business can stroll in if only for a few minutes, and 
women may find it lying right across the pathway of 
their daily walk. I have in my eye at this moment a 
site fulfilling in ever}^ respect these requirements 
and offering us space enougli for all our purposes. It is 
that now imoccupied spot where the Savannah Volun- 
teer Guards once held their military meetings, giving us 
a fit opportunity of erecting a building in accordance 
with our own ideas. 

If these views should prove acceptable to the society, 
committees should be appointed to arrange the details 
and move at once in the work. 



7 






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LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 




014 419 453 6 # 



